of witches". Diana Wynne Jones has stated in answer to a question on her webpage: "I think Ms Rowling did get quite a few of her ideas from my books – though I have never met her, so I have never been able to ask her. My books were written many years before the Harry Potter books (Charmed Life was first published in 1977), so any similarities probably come from what she herself read as a child. Once a book is published, out in the world, it is sort of common property, for people to take ideas from and use, and I think this is what happened to my books." Discworld Before the arrival of J. K. Rowling, Britain's bestselling author was comic fantasy writer Terry Pratchett. His Discworld books, beginning with The Colour of Magic in 1983, satirise and parody common fantasy literature conventions. Pratchett was repeatedly asked if he "got" his idea for his magic college, the Unseen University, from Harry Potter Hogwarts, or if the young wizard Ponder Stibbons, who has dark hair and glasses, was inspired by Harry Potter. Both in fact predate Rowling's work by several years; Pratchett jokingly claimed that he did steal them, though "I of course used a time machine." The BBC and other British news agencies emphasised a supposed rivalry between Pratchett and Rowling, but Pratchett said on record that, while he did not put Rowling on a pedestal, he did not consider her a bad writer, nor did he envy her success. Claims of rivalry were due to a letter he wrote to The Sunday Times, about an article published declaring that fantasy "looks backward to an idealised, romanticised, pseudofeudal world, where knights and ladies morris-dance to Greensleeves". Actually, he was protesting the ineptitude of journalists in that genre, many of whom did not research their work and, in this case, contradicted themselves in the same article. Ender's Game Science fiction author Orson Scott Card, in a fierce editorial in response to Rowling's copyright lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon, claimed that her assertion that she had had her "words stolen" was rendered moot by the fact that he could draw numerous comparisons between her books and his own 1985 novel Ender's Game; in his words, Young Sherlock Holmes Chris Columbus, who directed the first two Harry Potter film adaptations, has cited the 1985 film Young Sherlock Holmes, which he